Essay

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We know so little about the true nature of time and, by extension, about what we so easily call “ history.” Consider the following true story.

I was lecturing at a major research university. Afterwards, as usually happens, really as always happens, a colleague asked me if she could tell me a story. She then proceeded to describe the following series of historical events.

A few years before our conversation, she had sent her four-year-old son up to a petting zoo north of the city with their nanny. At 10:06 a.m. she got a sudden “flash” of a picture in her head of her son screaming in his car seat at the back of the car and of the car filling up with what looked like white smoke, which she did not understand. She knew it was a serious car crash, as she could also “feel” the impact in her child’s body—viscerally. She immediately called her nanny. They were already at the petting zoo. She instructed the nanny to come home immediately and to drive very slowly. They got home just fine.

The next day the boy wanted to go back to the petting zoo. He had, after all, not been allowed to stay the day before. So the mother decided to drive him up herself this time. On the way there, a car made a sharp turn in front of them on the highway, and a crash ensued. The son was screaming in the back car seat. The airbags deployed and filled the car up with white powder or “smoke.” The mother turned around to check on her son: that was when the flash from the day before re-played, like a precise

“video re-run,” as she puts it. The man who hit them offered to call the woman’s husband after the crash, since the woman could not get to her phone. The emergency call registered on her husband’s phone at 10:08 a.m.

Such events should make us think twice about all of those divination practices that we looked at in Chapter 4. It turns out that human beings can sometimes see the future, can sometimes transcend the normal limitations of linear time. Notice, though, how all bets are off once we step out of time. For example, was this mother seeing into the future? Or was the future, perhaps as her future self, reaching back to her present self ? Also note that, by acting on the precognitive vision (and hence by preventing the child from a full visit at the zoo), the mother actually helped cause the future event to happen (since the child now wanted to return). Or did the vision from the future intend a warning, caused her to be more careful and cau- tious the next day, and this way helped prevent a much more serious event?

The school of the more

What is the historian, who is presumably interested in the full workings of time, supposed to make of such an event? The usual answer to this question is simple: “Nothing.” Just ignore it, or, if you have to do

The Filter Thesis: The Door in the Man 379 The Myers–James Filter Thesis 379 Aldous Huxley and Mind at Large 380 John Hick on Religion as Filter 383

Neuroscientists at the Cusp 383 Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight 384 Eben Alexander’s Cosmic Coma 385 Sam Harris on Telepathy and Panpsychism 387 David Eagleman, the Broken Watch, and the Parable of the Radio 388

Concluding Thoughts: Culture, Cognition, and Consciousness 389 The Tough Questions 392

Kripal, Jeffrey J., et al. Comparing Religions : Coming to Terms, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucok-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1597992. Created from ucok-ebooks on 2021-04-28 19:13:53.

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something, simply describe it and then call it a “ coincidence” or an “anecdote”—anything to get it off the table, so that we may preserve our supposedly perfect and complete understanding of the world. In instances like this, such lazy answers explain exactly nothing, of course, but they do deflect the discussion away from the truly serious, truly embarrassing issues at hand. Deflect and distract long enough, and such matters will go away.

They don’t go away, of course. They just keep appearing. Hence the history of religions—humanity’s millennia-long encounter and struggle with the anomalous, the powerful, the really, really weird stuff that does not fit in, that does not make sense.

Is there any way around this dead end? At first glance, the answer appears to be: “No.” The

two-hundred-year drama that is the modern study of religion has been driven by a kind of ping-pong movement between faithful re-readings and rational re-readings, that is, between belief and reason. The discussion, moreover, has often proceeded on the assumptions that what we have here is a zero-sum game, an either–or choice that must conclude either on the side of faith and its revealed doctrines or on the side of reason and its materialist and mechanistic conclusions.

A number of thinkers, including myself (and I speak and write in this final chapter as fully myself, relieving my co-writers of any responsibility for what follows), have decided that this is much too simple a picture, that history overflows, mocks, and offends both sides. These thinkers take experiences like that of the precog mother extremely seriously. Indeed they take them as keys to a future theory of religion. Accordingly, they have offered ways of looking at religion that I want to name now and bring under the rubric of reflexive re-readings.

Most simply put, a reflexive re-reading is that mode of interpretation that combines faithful and rationalist re-readings, even as it moves beyond both. More precisely, reflexive re-readings are those that embrace the most robust rationalist re-readings of religion in order to “reduce” religious phenomena back to human nature and human history, only to find that this nature and history cannot be fully

explained by human reason, that something else or more, and often something truly fantastic, appears to be shining through.

Like extremely precise visions of future car wrecks. Please note that reflexive re-readings cannot be

construed as simply faithful re-readings plus rational re-readings: a little faith here, a little reason there. Quite the contrary, reflexive re-readings constitute a genuinely new or third way of interpreting religion. It is not the case, then, that 1 + 1 = 2 here. Rather, 1 + 1 = 3. That is, we are dealing with yet another “third” or both–and mode of thinking. Robert A. Orsi has recently called this mode of thinking in the study of religion “the tradition of the more.”1 Reflexive re-readings clearly sit in this tradition of thought.

Let us call it “the school of the more.” If one can recognize faithful re-readings by

applying the faith test and strong forms of rationalist re-reading by applying the “nothing but” test, we can recognize reflexive re-readings by applying the “more” test. It goes like this: “After a series of reduc- tive or rationalist re-readings, is there some intuited truth or anomalous event, some altered state of energy or knowledge that is not finally explicable in rationalist or materialist terms?” In short: “Is there something more?” Note that this “more” need not be determined or defined, since no faith tradition or set of doctrines is being privileged or required (which is why these reflexive re-readings are not faithful re-readings). All that is required to label a re-reading “reflexive” is for such a “more” to be posited as likely or possible.

The “more” test can be understood better through a discussion of the “cost of admission” into the school of the more. Reflexive re-readings, it turns out, demand some fairly heavy costs of both faithful and rational re-readers.

First, with respect to faithful re-readings, reflexive re-readings are immediately suspicious of the ways in which exclusivism, inclusivism, and even plu- ralism assume some sort of stable “object” as the topic of theology, belief, and community. That is, the whole realm of comparative theology often implies that there is a single objective truth or, if you prefer, an external “God,” which is then revealed by a single

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tradition (exclusivism), or most fully expressed by a single tradition (inclusivism), or revealed and expressed through multiple cultural lenses and his- torical experiences (pluralism). Reflexive re-readings suggest in so many words that it is probably more accurate to think of religious truth not as something that is found or discovered, like a treasure buried in the ground, but as a conscious presence continually shaped and re-imagined by itself. Put a bit differently, we might say that reflexive re-readings recognize that all religious experience is indeed “constructed,” but constructed out of and upon something, which is really not a “thing” at all. It is as if the painter, the paint, and the painting were all different aspects of the same creative process.

As such paradoxical language suggests, there are also real costs related to the rational re-readings. Reflexive re-readings, after all, are those that employ the power of rationalist methods to reduce religious phenomena back to their fundamental base in human nature only to discover that this nature is something quite extraor- dinary in itself. Hence the “angry ghost” of poltergeist events becomes the “ghost of anger” of parapsy- chology—still human indeed, but a most extraordinary kind of human, who is clearly violating the way in which the world is supposed to work by reason’s rules.

We might recall here our initial definition of the humanities as consciousness studying consciousness in the reflecting mirror of culture. With reflexive re-readings of religion, we are still very much looking into that human mirror, with all the light-bending, mind-bending effects that this act involves, but we are also catching glimpses and clues of the final source of these constantly receding reflections: the looker. The results of this “looking into the looker” can sound utterly outrageous to the faithful believer and to the pure rationalist.

Four exemplars of reflexive re-reading

The best way to understand these final reflexive re-readings is not to describe them in the abstract, but to describe how they are performed with specific

historical materials by particular members of this school of the more. This is what I will do for the remaining of this chapter, before offering some final concluding personal thoughts.

The psychological Turn

Freud was a consummate intellectual, as critical of the beliefs of faith as he was of the pretensions of reason. His model of the unconscious was a nuanced system designed to explain and explore how the human really is two. It is certainly true that he thought of the depths of human nature in reductive materialist terms, but he also had his reflexive moments. For example, he was at once conflicted and open-minded about telepathy, as his skeptical (really horrified) friend Ernest Jones has amply documented in his three-volume biography of Freud. Although originally dismissive, Freud became convinced that there was a kernel of truth in such things. More than a kernel, really. He publicly acknowledged this in a 1925 essay and wrote six essays in all on the subject of thought-transference or telepathy.

The most obvious reflexive re-reader in the psychoanalytic tradition, however, is not Freud but his originally chosen successor, Carl Jung. Indeed, it could well be said that the first and most significant crisis in the early psychoanalytic tradition (Jung’s break with Freud) was over whether religion should be reductively re-read or reflexively re-read. Freud was adamant that it should be reductively re-read. Jung concluded that the reductive rational re-readings were powerful and true enough within their own range, but that something more was left over; that religious phenomena were indeed projective psychological phenomena, but that these were finally projected from a deeper layer or dimension of psyche that was essentially religious in nature and was vast.

Jung went on to argue that an individual psyche possesses its own individual unconscious, but that this personal unconscious is floating, as it were, in a measureless sea of universal mind and being that he called the collective unconscious. If the conscious

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ego is the tip of an iceberg and the personal uncon- scious is most of that iceberg lying under the surface of awareness, then the collective unconscious is the sea of mind and being out of which the individual psyche, that is, the person, “freezes” into hard form and comes into existence, at least for at time, before it is melted back into the ocean of mind.

Jung, in short, was “reducing” religious myths and symbols to the psyche, but to a psyche that opens out onto dimensions that are essentially religious, if not actually cosmic. He took rational re-readings very seriously, but he was also deeply concerned about the ways in which rationalism, mechanism, and materialism were thwarting human expression, denying the full range of the psyche, and shutting human beings off from the paradoxical richness of existence. For Jung, reality was not contained by reason and the senses, nor could it ever be.

The religion of man

Reflexive re-readings are not restricted to particular cultural zones. One of the clearest exemplars of such a comparative practice is the Indian Nobel laureate and Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Consider the poet’s Oxford lectures, which became The Religion of Man (1931). At first glance, one might think that the title of the book is simply an early ver- sion of a later “world religions” textbook, Huston Smith’s classic The Religions of Man (1958). One might imagine that here Tagore was after what Smith would clearly be after, one quarter of a century later, namely the universal validation of the believer’s per- spective and an entirely positive view of the world’s religions, which was pioneering for its time.

And one would be wrong. Tagore did not mean “the religion of man” to refer to the world religions that human beings have long practiced around the globe. “Man” here is not the subject, but the proper object of religion. By “the religion of man” Tagore means the worship of the human, of the man of the heart, the supreme person that dwells at the inner door of each and every human being. Such a vision hardly affirms the perspective of every believer and

every world religion. Quite the contrary, it requires a robust critique, even a rejection of just about every religious tradition on the planet, at least in their orthodox forms. Hence Tagore can write about how he left his own tradition, Hinduism, and he can describe his own Indian culture’s “irrational repres- sions” and “accumulations of dead centuries.” He can also speak of the “ghastly disguise of religion” and, in a phrase strikingly resonant with the contemporary “spiritual but not religious” crowd, he can reject reli- gious tradition as “blindly pious but not spiritual.”2 His conclusion is in fact highly critical of religious tradition and religious identity across the board: “The God of humanity,” he declares, “has arrived at the gates of the ruined temple of the tribe.”3

It will hardly surprise you by now to learn that Tagore’s reflexive comparative practice found its origin not in any rational process, but in the “sudden flash” of two mystical experiences, which he relates in one of his Oxford lectures entitled simply “The Vision.” The first experience, which he compares to an ancient mist suddenly lifting, occurred when he was eighteen. It lasted for four days. The second occurred when he was an adult and was working in a village: “All things that had seemed like vagrant waves were revealed to my mind in relation to a boundless sea.” Now he “felt sure that some Being who comprehended me and my world was seeking his best expression in all my experiences, uniting them into an ever-widening individuality which is a spiritual work of art.”4 The painter who is the painted and the paint again.

It was such a vision that showed him that “on the surface of our being we have the ever-changing phases of the individual self, but in the depth there dwells the Eternal Spirit of human unity beyond our direct knowledge.”5 This is what he calls “the surplus in man,” his version of what I have called “the human as two.” In another shift of metaphors, the poet explains the relationship between difference and sameness: “in the night we stumble over things and become acutely conscious of their individual separateness. But the day reveals the greater unity which embraces them. The man whose inner vision is bathed in an illumination

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of his consciousness at once realizes the spiritual unity reigning supreme over all differences.”6

Nor will it surprise you that Tagore’s initial inspiration for how to articulate his vision was a group of mystics: the Bengali poet-singers called Bauls, who wander to this day the roads, villages, and cities of northeastern India without temple, without scripture, and singing of the secret core of the human being—of what Tagore calls “the divinity of Man.”7 The Bauls are “compara- tivist” mystics, effortlessly combining teachings of both Hinduism and Islam into their songs and practices.

Significantly, Tagore first chanced upon their songs about the same time he had “given up my connection with our church,” after realizing that the religious institutions “represented an artificial average, with its standard of truth at its static minimum.”8 He would now reject all of that and seek “the Supreme Man,” who is “infinite in his essence,” if “finite in his mani- festation in us the individuals.”9 “Religion,” he wrote, “is the liberation of our individual personality in the universal Person who is human all the same.”10

sociology and the projector

Durkheim’s reduction of religious phenomena to social processes seems complete, even if his respect for the holism and the hidden power of the social system sometimes borders on a kind of reverence or awe. The potential reflexivity of sociological re-readings can best be appreciated in later figures.

Consider again the American sociologist of religion Peter Berger. Toward the very end of The Sacred Canopy, Berger makes a most remarkable observation with respect to projection theory and mathematics. Why is it, he asks, that mathematics, which appears to exist only in the minds of human beings, through abstract symbols called “numbers,” turns out to reflect and predict, very precisely, the workings of the natural world—the world “out there”? How to explain this unbelievable correspondence between inner and outer? Two and a half millennia ago, Plato had asked the same question. He suggested that the perfect forms of mathematics, which cannot be derived from sensory experience, are not actually

learned but are “remembered” by the soul. Math, in short, functions as a sign of the soul’s pre-existence, when it had direct contact with the true reality that the perfection of mathematics stands for.

Berger moves in a different theological direction, one more in tune with the Christian notion of human beings made “in the image of God” (another version of the idea of mirror). More specifically, he suggests what he calls an “interesting ploy,” which is nothing but a reflexive re-reading of religion: “man projects ultimate meanings into reality because that reality is, indeed, ultimately meaningful, and because his own being (the empirical ground of these projections) contains and intends these same ultimate meanings.”11 In a sequel, his Rumor of Angels, Berger puts the matter in even more stark and provocative terms: “If the religious projections of man correspond to a reality that is superhuman and supernatural, then it seems logical to look for traces of this reality in the projector himself.”12 Note, here again, the reflexive cycle in which language about the superhuman is re-read as language about the human, which turns out to be superhuman.

reflexivity as modern mysticism

Finally, consider a contemporary example of a reflexivity so extreme that it becomes, in effect, a mystical expe- rience in its own right. In 1997 American author Erik Davis was in a Zen Buddhist retreat center in northern California; he had gone there to recover from the labors of writing his first book, Techgnosis, which dealt with the intersections of technology, magic, and mysticism. Davis was washing vegetables in a garden:

So I’m rinsing the beets, minding my own business, vaguely enjoying the cool water washing away the moist and pungent mud, when my “I” suddenly rockets like a sci-fi space elevator into the highest, most barren and serene realms of Witness consciousness. I became the watcher of the watcher of the watcher of the watcher of the watcher of the watcher … a bootstrapping eensy-weensy spider of observer and observation that shed layers of identification as it flip-flopped up the water spout into even more rarified levels of subjectivity, until there was little left.13

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Davis resists all “mystic rhetoric” here, because “it sounds like bullshit, and my experience was anything but bullshit, at least to me.” The mystic rhetoric, however, is inescapable, and so it appears anyway, if now as a series of subtle allusions to the vajra, the “diamond” mind of Tibetan Buddhism and the “grokking” of Robert A. Heinlein’s countercultural sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land. So Davis continues:

One thing is for sure: there was nothing particularly human in it. It felt like a being, but it had no attributes I can really name other than awareness and perception. It felt like diamond, like hard serenity, a clear and crystalline meta-mind that was both individual and, in some ungrokkable, transpersonal way, collective. And ever so slightly amused.

Davis calls this level of himself “the bright shards of witnessing angelstuff that lie at the root of my being.” This is more than poetic license. Even if this experience was “a neural hiccup,” he concludes: “I still know, in the way we know the mad unions of love, that we carry something cosmic within us, that the self is a doorway to another Self, and that death might swallow us in glory after all.” In short, Davis had known, directly and dramatically, something astonishing about human nature, something that there was no way to measure or lock down into a system. He had passed through a doorway, or a mirror, to another self—the human as two.

Erik Davis had looked at the looker, who was looking back at him.

The phenomenology of religion: What is versus What appears

It can be disconcerting to look into the mirror of religion and see yourself looking at yourself, who turns out to be someone else. This is why I kept these methods until the very end of our journey together and why, like all the other re-readings, they are being presented as speculative options for you to take up or set down. Remember: it’s a mirror. You

don’t have to look into it. You can walk away. You are your own authority here. So take responsibility for your choices and for what you are seeing.

And not seeing. Our eyes pick up about one ten-trillionth of the total

light spectrum. That’s right. You see one ten-trillionth of what is actually there, right now. Basically, you are totally blind. You do not perceive the world as it is. You perceive the world as your evolved biology and its sensory system allow you, force you to perceive it. Even the immediate perceptions you take as accurate photo- graphs of something “out there” are neither immediate nor innocent, objective photographs. Perception is actually memory in the simple sense that what you see, or think you see, has already been processed by your brain into an organized experience. You do not even perceive in the present. You perceive in the just past. Your perceptions are memories shaped into virtual experiences by lightning-quick brain processes. Sensorially speaking, you are living in the past, always. As David Eagleman summarizes the situation: “So the first lesson about trusting your senses is: don’t.”14

This is the present neuroscientific position. It is hardly new. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) demonstrated the same (minus the math and brain scans) over two hundred years ago. And he was working in a philosophical tradition that goes back at least as far as ancient Greece: thinkers like Plato clearly distinguished between the “divine” world of Forms, which the enlightened philosopher can “know” (even if only indirectly in this life), and the social and sensory world of mere opinion, which is not true knowledge but a mere shadow, a mere ten-trillionth fraction of the real, we might say. Remember Plato’s Cave?

For his part, Kant demonstrated that what appears to us and what is out there—the thing-in-itself, as he called the latter—are two very different matters. He called what appears to us the phenomenon (from the Greek to phainomenon, “that which appears/is visible”) and the thing-in-itself the noumenon (from the Greek to nooumenon, “that which is thought”). We can never really get hold of noumenal reality, Kant argued. We can never really know it, and we certainly cannot think it.

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We can only perceive and experience the world, he argued, through the already given (today we might say “hard-wired”) categories of thinking and perception: space, time, and causality. He called these structures of thinking and perceiving a priori categories. These pre- cede, shape, and determine thought but are not them- selves accessible to view. They may or may not be “out there.” They are certainly “in here,” however, and they structure and determine everything we think and perceive, everything we can think and perceive.

An important branch of the study of religion called the phenomenology of religion works on this same philosophical principle. The phenomenology of religion sets aside or “brackets” the truth claims of the religious material it is studying; it seeks instead to describe, as accurately as it can, “what appears” to a person under- going a particular type of religious experience. Among many other things, this bracketing allows the disci- pline to take seriously the radical pluralism of the religious experience, as this move implicitly recognizes that all religious experience, like all sensory or cultural experience, will be conditioned and shaped, that there is no such thing as a pure religious experience.

One could well argue that no philosophical argument has been simpler, more elegant, and more influential on modern western thought, including the modern study of religion. Indeed all of our present methods—from historical criticism, constructivism, and functionalism to evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and postcolonial theory—come down to a basic conviction that we can never know reality as it is; we can only know reality as it is constructed, shaped, and conditioned by our brains, societies, histories, biol- ogies, politics, cognitive software, and so on.

These assumptions about the human mind and its inability to know reality as it is may not, however, be the final word.

reflexively re-reading miracle: The man in the Door

New Jersey resident Nina de Santo saw a long-time customer named Michael standing outside her

beauty shop one Saturday evening. She met him at the door. Michael was smiling. He was in a hurry and could not stay long. He had been going through a very difficult divorce and had lost custody of his kids. He just wanted to thank Nina for all the times she was there to listen. And then he left. The next day Nina received a phone call from one of her employees. Michael had committed suicide the day before, nine hours before she met him in front of her shop.15

A student sent me this story, which was reported by CNN. It reminded me immediately of another set of stories, with which I was very familiar but had not thought about for years: the gospel stories of the resurrected Jesus, whom his mourning disciples encountered on the road to Emmaus and in the breaking of the bread at a meal as a real physical presence, very much like Michael at Nina’s beauty shop. I had long assumed that these gospel narra- tives were socially constructed legends, created in the early Christian communities to express the members’ fervent belief in their risen Lord. I am no longer so sure about that. I am beginning to wonder if they are not rather literary transformations of actual historical encounters, much like that of Nina de Santo in New Jersey.16 My reasoning is simple: if such things can happen in contemporary America, why could they have not happened in the ancient world?

I am by no means the first person to re-read the ancient religious texts in light of reports of contemporary paranormal experiences. Indeed this was a common method in the nineteenth century. Consider the example of an old acquaintance of ours …

David Friedrich strauss and the miracle revisited

Recall that in Chapter 2 we briefly explained how David Friedrich Strauss’ The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835) played a major role in initiating the historical–critical study of the New Testament and, in a broader sense, the modern study of reli- gion. Recall also that much of Strauss’ work in that

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book was about demonstrating in detail how the four gospels cannot be reconciled with one another and why the different miracle and healing stories cannot be taken at face value. What we did not tell you at the beginning of your initiation but can tell you now, at the end of it, is that Strauss later changed his mind about miracles, mostly because he himself had met “the seeress of Provost”: a living clair- voyant, medium, and healer named Friederike Hauffe (1801–1829). In her presence Strauss wit- nessed what he took to be genuinely unexplainable events around the then contemporary phenomena of animal magnetism (see Figure 12.1).

Animal magnetism, also called “Mesmerism”— after the Austrian healer Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), who helped originate and spread the method (this is also the origin of the English word

“mesmerized”)—was a healing practice that accessed unusual forms of human energy, which Mesmer and the magnetists likened to the invisible force fields of natural magnetism. Indeed they generally thought that these energies were a form of natural magnetism. Whatever they were, the literature is filled with dramatic stories about how these energies effected cures and spiritual transformations. “Magnetized” individuals were reported to manifest fantastic abilities, for example the ability to see into bodies (their own or those of others), to diagnose illnesses and suggest treatments, and to manifest clairvoyance. The latter is a French word that means “clear vision” but is normally used in a narrow, specialized sense, to designate the capacity to see things that are otherwise inaccessible, like events happening at a distance.

Figure 12.1 Mesmer conducting a baquet or group treatment with a “magnetized” tub of water. Mary Evans Picture Library.

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It was precisely these kinds of altered states of energy that Strauss was now witnessing close up with the seeress. The great biblical critic realized, with something of a shock, that these abilities, which he could no longer deny, had real implications for how he read the miracle stories of the New Testament, which he had denied. He understood that, if they were happening in his own time, they could have just easily happened in the time of Jesus.

Strauss went further. He read deeply into the Christian mystics. He read authors like the German shoemaker Jacob Boehme, who once saw the meaning of the cosmos in the sunny reflections bouncing off a pewter dish (the mirror again, this time in a form of divination that you might now recognize as lecano- mancy). He met the German poet-physician Justinus Kerner, who was working with Hauffe and studying him, and who had come to the conclusion that the traumatic technology of illness was necessary to “open up” a human being to the higher worlds.

All of this would have a profound effect on Strauss’ famous book. As his modern editor Peter C. Hodgson explains, Strauss’ discussion of miracles in the first two editions revolved around a rationalist re-reading of two types: the miracle as literal truth involving supernatural intervention (which he rejected), and the miracle as a misidentified power of nature, what we would today call suggestion or psychosomatic healing (which he accepted). However, in the 1838 third edition of the book, Strauss felt it necessary to introduce a third type: the miracle as a real and highly unusual phenomenon of nature (what would later be called “the para- normal”). “These cures,” Hodgson explains,

can still be explained on the basis of nature, as with the second type, but they display uncommon or extraordinary powers, similar to the absolute miracles of the first type. Strauss has in mind cures involving touch, cures based on the hypnotic power of will or on clairvoyance, and cures at a distance (mental telepathy).17

In short, Strauss had in mind the seeress of Provost.

ioan Couliano’s Toolkit for the Fourth Dimension

Ioan Couliano was a historian of religions who worked with Mircea Eliade (both were Romanians) at the University of Chicago and taught there himself. He was an early advocate of the cognitive approach to the study of religion. He argued that the obvious similarities in religious belief across immense stretches of time can be best explained by positing “a simple set of rules” that “would generate similar results in the minds of human beings for a virtually infinite period of time.” These rules might be things like “there is another world” or “there is a soul that separates from the body when a person dies.” The fact that the cultural transmission of these simple rules—whose limited variants and interactions he compared to the features of rules in a game—is never perfect helps explain both the sameness and the differences that we find in the general history of religions. All human traditions developed in parallel “from analogous premises, although beliefs inevitably interacted and coalesced. The result is a surprising unity in the variety.”18

The question remained, however: just what kind of mind was playing with all these rules? It was here that he entertained some most remarkable ideas, which went far beyond anything that cognitive science has so far imagined (so it seems appropriate that he named a journal he founded Incognita, that is, “things un-cognized” or “unknown”). One of these ideas was that historians should stop thinking about history as if it worked like a straight line on a flat pool table. After Einstein, he pointed out, we know that space and time are not like that. At all.

Couliano was especially fascinated by Einstein’s theory of relativity and by the legacy of earlier nineteenth-century authors of the “fourth dimension,” particularly Charles Howard Hinton (1853–1907) and Edward Abbot (1838–1926), to which relativity theory was itself indebted. Hinton was a mathemati- cian, bigamist, defender of women’s rights, and the inventor of the automatic baseball pitching machine. He authored books like The Fourth Dimension (1904) and a collection of Scientific Romances (1884–1886),

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a kind of early science fiction that Couliano describes as “mystic–scientific fantasies.” For his part, Abbot authored the classic Flatland (1883), a little book that influenced Einstein (and a whole lot of science fiction).

Drawing on Abbot’s Flatland and on Hinton’s insistence that certain inexplicable experiences (namely experiences that we, today, would call “ paranormal”) are in fact real experiences of a fourth spatial dimension, Couliano pointed out that most of the “miraculous” abilities reported in ecstatic states, otherworldly journeys, and parallel universes would be easily understandable if we simply imagined them as functions of a “mind space” that exists in four spatial dimensions and relates to our three-dimensional world much as our three- dimensional nature might relate to a being restricted to a two-dimensional world—just like in Abbot’s Flatland.

Imagine our relationship to a community of beings restricted to a tabletop. Such beings cannot move vertically, nor can they perceive anything that is not on the tabletop. They can only move or perceive on that flat surface: “In relation to them,” Couliano observed,

we can act like gods: we can make objects appear and disappear from the most recondite recesses (such as bank safes), we can take them instantly from one point of their space to another (an experience that they would probably interpret in mystical terms), and we can even flip them around through the third dimension so that their right side becomes left and their left side right. We can observe them at every moment and remain unnoticed.19

To the 2-D Flatlander, any 3-D being would seem omniscient and omnipotent, not to mention miracu- lous and completely invisible.20 Something similar (if

Figure 12.2 Peering into the secret structure of the cosmos. Sixteenth-century illustration for Nicolas Camille Flammarion, L’atmosphère: Météorologie populaire (Paris, 1888). © Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis.

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more extreme), of course, would be true of a 4-D intervention into a 3-D world. Hence the paranormal: the normal just “beyond” (para) the normal.

Note here that one needs no particular belief, deity, or religious identity to perform this re-reading of miracle “from the fourth dimension.” There is no “supernatural” here. All one needs is a mathematical modeling of multiple dimensions and an ability to imagine ourselves outside our three-dimensional box (or cave). Hence Couliano’s provocative observation that “physics and mathematics are to be held responsible to a large extent for the return of interest in mystical ways of knowledge.”21 After all, in light of modern physics and mathematics, “we are entitled to believe that our mind space has amazing properties, the most remarkable of which is that it is not limited to three dimensions.”22 (See Figure 12.2.)

Couliano turns to the history of otherworldly journeys or flights of the soul from ancient Greece to the modern literatures on the near-death experience (NDE) for confirmation of his most remarkable suggestion. These accounts, after all, describe—if usually in exaggerated mythical language—exactly the kinds of things one would expect if a mind space were to enter a hyper-dimensional state. They thus speak of “being turned around” (we find this phrase as early as in the Greek philosopher Plotinus and as late as in the comic book writer Grant Morrison), of being able to see in all directions at once, of being present at all places and times, of being able to see inside reality, and of turning into their own mirror image, “not unlike,” Couliano points out, Alice when she “stepped through the looking glass into a reversed world.”23

Couliano calls this re-reading of miracle through physics and mathematics “a historian’s kit for the fourth dimension.” Such a kit is a reflexive re-reading of religion, since it reduces the seemingly miraculous religious event to something natural, in this case the hyper-dimensional structures of space–time, only to discover that miracles are real and that the natural is better framed, particularly from our limited 3-D perspective, as the super natural.

There are many very real pay-offs here for the student of religion. One of them is that Couliano’s kit helps us explain, almost effortlessly, why the ancients imagined the heavens to be “up,” and why we can no longer do so. All human beings who lived before the last hundred years or so could not physically move up into the sky. They were stuck tight to the more or less flat two-dimensional surface of the earth. Practically speaking, they lived in a kind of Flatland. They thus naturally imagined their spiritual flights in three dimensions, that is, as moving “up.” But we can now go up into the sky quite easily. Little wonder, then, that the religious imagina- tion has moved on to four and five dimensions (since, after Einstein, we now understand time to be the “fourth dimension”). Remember Grant Morrison’s alien contact experience, in which he was turned around, “rotated through a plane I could not now point to,” and “twisted off the surface of the universe into the fifth dimension”? Ioan Couliano would have appreciated that.

synchronicity and the pauli effect

Another most remarkable twentieth-century example of a reflexive re-reading of miracle and magic involved physics again, this time in the person of one of the early pioneers of quantum physics. The story also features two famous psychologists and a poltergeist of sorts. It goes like this.

We have already met the poltergeist—the “angry ghost.” Recall that researchers have consistently noticed that poltergeist events tend to happen around very distraught pubescent boys and girls. It is as if these young men and women, all pent-up and conflicted inside, can no longer contain their emotions, and so they “let them out.” Pictures fall off the wall. Things break and fly. But, interestingly, it is extremely rare that anyone is ever reported hurt or injured. It is as if such things are ultimately performances designed to attract attention, but not to do actual harm. Researchers, feeling indebted to Freud, have called this the “projected repression hypothesis.”

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Still in a Freudian mode, other thinkers have noticed that the emotional conflict is sometimes also sexual. They have speculated that rare types of sexual energy are sometimes being deployed in such events. In one reported case, for example, poltergeist phenomena, including moving furniture and floating school desks, spiked around an eleven-year- old Irish girl named Virginia Campbell on a twenty- eight-day cycle.24 Human sexuality—the menstrual cycle, to be precise—has become here a kind of unconscious superpower.

It is by no means always the kids who are distraught, though. Poltergeist-like events have also played important roles in both the history of the study of religion and, believe it or not, the history of science. They marked, for example, one of the most significant breaks in the history of modern psy- chology: that between Sigmund Freud and his chosen heir, C. G. Jung. As Jung tells the story in his famous memoir, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, 1909 was the turning point. The two men were in Freud’s study arguing about the reality of precognition and other similar phenomena. Freud was rejecting it all as nonsensical, out of his own materialistic convictions (it would be years, Jung explains, before Freud “acknowledged the factuality of ‘occult’ phenomena”). And here is, according to Jung, what happened next:

While Freud was going on this way, I had a curious sensation. It was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot—a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the book- case, which stood right next to us, that we both started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud: “There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon.” “Oh come,” he exclaimed. “That is sheer bosh.” “It is not,” I replied. You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove my point I now predict that in a movement there will be another such loud report!” Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the same detonation went off in the bookcase.25

Such events were common in Jung’s life and often marked significant moments of creativity or insight.

Indeed Jung thought and wrote about the paranormal for his entire career. His dissertation was on occultism (more precisely, on a medium who happened to be his own cousin). His house was haunted by poltergeist effects around his break with Freud—a series of events that ended only when he allowed himself to channel a new gnostic scripture entitled “Seven Sermons to the Dead.” Moreover, late in life he wrote a quite prescient little book on UFOs that is still relevant and germane to the topic. Clearly and most remarkably, Jung had “come to terms” with the paranormal.

Partly this coming to terms happened through another new term: synchronicity. By it Jung meant to refer to those fantastic coincidences in our lives that seem to point to something more. He eventually concluded that at least some of these are not really coincidences at all; nor are they exactly “caused.” Rather they show every evidence of being organized around meaning and metaphor, like, say, a poem or a symbol—something very much akin to what Charles Fort meant when he insisted that anomalous events are “expressions,” or to what Mark Twain meant when he wrote that history may not repeat itself, but that it rhymes.

What Jung intended to express with his notion of synchronicity was the fact that sometimes what is going on inside the subject corresponds in a profound way to what is going on outside the subject, as if the mental and material dimensions of those special moments had “split off ” from some deeper one single thing. We might say, then, that the mental and material dimensions of our experience some- times “correspond” or “coincide” (remember our discussion about the symbol?) precisely because they have split off a common source that is neither mental nor material. Jung in fact speculated that this was precisely the case and referred to the deeper super- reality as the unus mundus, that is, “the one world” or “the unitary world.”

What we have here, of course, is a modern updating of “magic,” now re-read reflexively: not as a super- natural force attributed to a deity or demon, but as a manifestation of the deepest levels of the real world,

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of which the human being would be a double expression (material and mental).

There is a funny but important back-story here that involves the history of science. Jung developed his original concept of synchronicity out of a decades-long correspondence and friendship with the Nobel prize-wining quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958). Pauli was quite conflicted about his emotional and sexual life. Indeed he first approached Jung when he was in pain, for help. Pauli, a famously explosive personality, was well known among his physics colleagues for a rather unique ability: they called it “the Pauli effect.” The Pauli effect boiled down to the strange fact that, whenever Pauli would walk into a physics labora- tory, an apparatus would inevitably fall, break, shatter, or burn. Pauli, who was very proud of the effect, clearly believed in its reality. He also noted in his correspondence that, whenever “it” happened, he would feel relief from his inner tension. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion: Wolfgang Pauli was a walking poltergeist (see Figure 12.3).

The physicists, of course, avoided such religiously loaded language. Hence their safe and sterile coinage: the Pauli effect. They hardly avoided the topic, though. In his history of quantum physics, theoretical physicist and cosmologist George Gamow explained that “something would usually break in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the threshold.” Gamow goes on to describe one of the most famous—and most humorous—cases in the lore of physics:

A mysterious event that did not seem at first to be connected with Pauli’s presence once occurred in Professor J. Franck’s lab in Göttingen. Early one afternoon, without apparent cause, a complicated apparatus for the study of atomic phenomena col- lapsed. Franck wrote humorously about this to Pauli at his Zurich address and, after some delay, received an answer in an envelope with a Danish stamp. Pauli wrote that he had gone to visit Bohr, and at the time of the mishap in Franck’s laboratory his train was stopped for a few minutes at the Göttingen railroad station.26

Figure 12.3 Jung–Pauli Dialog (1995), by Juergen Jaumann, acrylic on canvas, 150 × 100 cm. Private collection of Harald Atmanspacher.

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And the lore goes on. Pauli’s friend, Otto Stern, actually banned Pauli from his own laboratory in Hamburg because of the same effect. And when I once spoke about Pauli in a Unitarian church ser- vice in Houston, an elderly man approached me afterwards to tell me about the time he was with Pauli at a physics conference in Jerusalem. It was a very hot day. The organizers made Pauli sit on the side of the room opposite the air conditioner. Sometimes practical concerns trump everything else.

The Filter Thesis: The Door in the man

There are still other ways to re-read religion reflex- ively. One of the most common and useful is the filter thesis. Put simply, the filter (or transmission) thesis suggests that consciousness (as opposed to social identity, cognition, culture, or ego) is filtered, reduced, or transmitted through the brain but not produced by it.

The myers–James Filter Thesis

Until the very end of his life, William James struggled with religious experience at its most extreme. He worked closely with mediums and witnessed psy- chical phenomena up close. He never claimed to understand what he had witnessed, but he did have a set of working theses, which appeared in The Varieties as the notion of a “door” in the subconscious and, in a late essay on the baffling nature of psychical research, as a “mother-sea” of consciousness in which we are all floating.

The door imagery appears in The Varieties as James’s Lecture X on the subject of conversion. James is discussing the notion of a “subliminal self,” which he borrowed from his close friend and colleague Frederic Myers. Myers’ subliminal self was meant to refer to that vast region of the human personality that exists and works “below” (sub) the “threshold” (limen) of normal consciousness (another kind of “liminal” region), and that may be responsible for extraordinary capacities like telepathy

and clairvoyance. Myers would often capitalize this subliminal “Self,” to signal its astonishing reach and cosmic implications. This was the Superman to the ego’s Clark Kent.

In his own use of the subliminal self, James discussed how dramatic conversion experiences—in which a person suddenly changes character overnight, even instantly—appear to require some sort of “leaky or pervious margin.” By this he means to suggest that in some individuals the conscious sense of self is porous and open to “external” influ- ences, which may in fact be “internal.” The human as two again.

This is a very old theme, of course. And a gendered one. In her The Hammer and the Flute (2005), historian of religions Mary Keller has pointed out that such a porous nature has traditionally been framed in primarily negative terms and related to the female gender. Noting that women are often more likely than men to be possessed by deities or spirits, numerous (male) commentators have suggested that this is because women are naturally more “passive” or “penetrable” (and the sexual connotations were often duly noted).27 Myers and James were developing a similar notion, but for them this porous nature was not restricted to one of the genders. Moreover—and this was their real originality—they considered such an openness eminently positive. This, after all, was what makes a great writer, a great thinker, or a religious prodigy. This is what makes a genius. Hence lines like these: “The hubbub of the waking life might close a door which in the dreamy Subliminal might remain ajar or open … If there be higher powers able to impress us, they may beg access to us only through the subliminal door.”28

Perhaps nowhere was James more clear on this than in his “Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher” (1909), published less than a year before his death. James had finally concluded what his old friend Fred Myers had concluded: that we are not who we think we are. Here is how he put it:

Out of my experience such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges,

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and it is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea … there is a continuum of cosmic conscious- ness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir. Our “normal” consciousness is circumscribed for adaptation to our external earthly environment, but the fence is weak in spots, and fitful influences from beyond leak in, showing the otherwise unverifiable common connection.29

James called this a “panpsychic” view of the universe, where people “individuate” out of a psychophysical sea—again, not unlike floating icebergs freezing into shape and then melting away in the endless waves of an ocean that is at once mental and material. Hence his speculations about “subtler forms of matter” in this “psychic sea.”30 Recall that panpsychism is a modern term resonant with many ancient world- views in which “everything (to pan) is soul (psuchē),” in which everything, including what we think of as “dead” matter, is actually alive. In a figure like William James we can now see that such a position can also become a reflexive position in which everything is understood to be matter, but this matter, it turns out, is minded—another reflexive “flip” or reversal.

The filter or transmission thesis, it should be said, is not really new. Something very similar appears to be implied by Plato’s famous parable of the Cave, with its primitive “projection technology” (our two-dimensional shadow senses are projected from a richer three-dimensional space, which itself is finally transcended by a hyper-dimensional world “outside”). Paul Marshall has also noted that the Hindu Tantric kundalini yoga system seems to assume something similar, through a series of increasingly dense filters (the chakras) “stepping down” consciousness, from outside the body “down” into the brain and the var- ious neurological functions of the spinal system.31

As for the filter thesis itself, it would have a long rich history in the twentieth century. After Myers and James, it was taken up and developed further by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, by the English philosopher C. D. Broad, and by the novelist Aldous Huxley. Most recently, it has appeared among

a number of contemporary neuroscientists and med- ical professionals as either a possible solution to the “hard problem” of consciousness, or, as we will see in a moment, as a cosmic truth known directly in stroke and coma.

aldous Huxley and mind at large

Huxley was especially influential in the cultural life of the filter thesis. But his thinking was not just thinking. It was a direct and immediate mystical experience turned into thinking and then into a most remarkable little book: The Doors of Perception (1954). This slim volume is easily one of the most influential essays on an individual religious experience published in the twentieth century. In it, Huxley drew on both Asian religious and western poetic and philosophical sources in order to describe what he had known during an eight-hour “trip” on four tenths of a gram of mescaline, swished down in a simple half-glass of water. Those few historical gulps took place on May 4, 1953, in the hills of Los Angeles, under the supervision of a British psychiatrist named Humphrey Osmond. Huxley had written to Osmond the year before and proposed just such an experiment.

The problems Huxley faced in explaining to the public what happened to him on that special day were considerable, but they were not what one might first imagine. The problems were not legal ones, as there were no laws at this point against taking mescaline, or LSD for that matter (the journalist and writer Don Lattin once showed me a television clip from the 1950s in which an American housewife was given LSD on the program). The problems were rather theological, ethical, and philosophical. The theological and ethical problems all boiled down to the strange fact that a person, theoretically any person, could come to know something of what the mystics, mediums, and saints of the world’s religions had known, without their beliefs, without their rituals, or, most shocking of all, without their moral development. All one needed was the right chemical trigger.

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The philosophical problem boiled down to the question of whether such states were simply a matter of brain chemistry, that is, of the “drug.” Huxley did not think so. For one thing, his own experience on mescaline produced no trippy visions. He clearly was not hallucinating. Quite the contrary, as he put it, “the great change was in the realm of objective fact.”32 What he meant by this was that the mescaline somehow opened him up to a direct encounter not with another symbol or representation, but with reality as it really is.

This, Huxley thought, was a true glimpse of what the Hindus call enlightenment and the Buddhists call emptiness or “the void.” It certainly was not Immanuel Kant, who had staked his entire philosophical project on the claim that such a moment could never ever happen.

It did to Aldous Huxley. To explain it, Huxley adapted the filter thesis and

then used it to explain how psychedelic substances might well be necessary catalysts of such mind man- ifestations without ever causing them. He speculated that the main function of such chemicals is not to produce or cause something, but to suppress, inhibit, or stop something, namely the brain’s basic utilitarian function as a filter or “reducing valve” of conscious- ness. By doing so, such chemicals allow other forms of mind, which are probably always present, to rush in. The mescaline, then, is no biochemical cause. It is a trigger. It is a door.

This idea is precisely what lies behind the new and soon to be famous word that Osmond would coin in correspondence with Huxley: “psyche-delic” or “mind-revealing.” The paramount example of this revealed mind is what Huxley called “Mind at Large.” What he meant by Mind at Large was what his beloved mystics had meant. For him, Mind at Large is more or less equivalent to what the Hindu tradition calls brahman and what the Chinese and Tibetan Buddhist traditions call “Buddha nature” or “the mind of clear light.” Mind at large is who we really are beyond our superficial surface selves, religious identities, and limiting physical senses. It is that form of consciousness that perceives reality directly and

immediately, without all the utilitarian filters of survival, measurement, and language. Hence Huxley’s famous quoting of the English poet William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is: infinite.” This is a line from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that inspired the title of Huxley’s own book (see Figure 12.4).

It did to Aldous Huxley. In this model at least, mind is not the brain, but

mind is indeed filtered through the brain with all its mind-boggling evolutionary, neurological, cultural, linguistic, emotional, political, and historical complexities. We are local context and construction, and we share a kind of cosmic consciousness that is universal and irreducible to any local context or construction. In short, the filter thesis is a compara- tive practice that effectively combines radical difference with radical sameness.

It should be stressed at this point that all those who proposed the filter thesis did so not because they “believed” anything (including the crude 3-D metaphor of a filter), but because they understood quite keenly that the materialist models simply cannot recognize the existence of the full sweep of the historical data, much less explain it. Today we might say that they understood that something like the filter thesis has the advantage of being capable of embracing both the findings of modern psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science (as applicable to the brain and the socially constructed ego) and some of the most astonishing moments in the general history of religions (as applicable to a multi- dimensional mind space or Mind at Large).

How? In these models, mind is not simply a product of brain or culture. It exists in its own dimensions and on its own terms. To employ a much maligned expression in the study of religion, consciousness here is a thing “unto itself ” or “of its own kind” (sui generis), finally determined neither by the three dimensions of space nor by time (which is to say history). Once we make such a move, that is, once we stop thinking crudely, in three dimensions, about a “ghost in a machine” or some kind of sepa- rable soul “inside a box” (of the skull), much that was

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previously puzzling and impossible becomes imme- diately understandable and possible.

Such models have no problem explaining how, for example, the precog mother in our opening story “saw” in perfect detail a quick series of events that would take place miles away and exactly twenty-four hours in the future, or how Mark Twain had a

precognitive dream of his brother’s death, both up the river and up the calendar. Such feats, after all, are only impossible if we understand mind as something produced by a local brain contained in a three-dimensional box. If, on the other hand, we understand consciousness as a multidimensional mind space that is “filtered” or transmitted into and

Figure 12.4 Plate 14 from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1808) by William Blake, hand-colored etching. Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library.

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through a particular 3-D brain-box and further into history, but never completely localized in either, then there is nothing in principle to prevent such a mind space from knowing about an event beforehand or hundreds of miles away. Indeed, we would expect exactly these sorts of events. The theory, in other words, predicts precisely what we find.

We simply have to shift our mind space. We have to move out of Flatland.

John Hick on religion as Filter

Few scholars have taken the filter thesis more seriously than the comparative theologian John Hick, whom we met in Chapter 10. Indeed, for Hick, it is not just the brain that is a “filter.” So too is religion. This basic metaphor of religion as filter allows Hick to acknowledge both the constructed nature of all religion (the rightful concern and focus of the rational re-readings) and its likely transcendent referent or source (the rightful concern and focus of the faithful re-readings). Hick, in other words, insists that human beings do have access to the real, and that this divine reality communicates with human beings through the medium of the religious imagination.

In God Has Many Names (1982) he compared such communications to the spiritualist communica- tions of nineteenth-century séances, which featured different spirit personalities manifesting in and through the psyche of the medium. Empirical and objectively true information often came through in these telepathic events, but always and only through the personality or “filter” of the medium’s psyche.33 That is, after all, why they were called mediums.

Hick extended these filter readings in his later work. In the most recent edition of An Interpretation of Religion (2004), for example, he consistently employed parapsychology and the category of telepathy to describe the direct or extra-sensory information transfer that is commonly reported in mystical experiences.34 He also, once again, described religions as “filters” through which “the real” is com- municated and experienced by different historical communities as both personal and impersonal.35 “In

terms of information theory,” he writes on the last point, “we are speaking of the transmission of information from a transcendent source to the human mind/brain and its transformation by the mind/brain into conscious experience.”36 He compares this mind-to-mind information transfer to extra- sensory perception (ESP). Because the brain’s main function is to limit or select incoming information, there is always distortion; and yet something is indeed coming through. This is why religions are at once fallible and fantastic, at once false and true.

Hick also describes religions as “resistances,” in the electronic or electrical sense of the term (“ resistance” is a measure of how much a particular material or object blocks or obstructs the free passage of electrons through it). This second metaphor allows him to explain how religions, like individual brains, “step down” the energy or power and so preserve the autonomy and “finite freedom” of individuals and communities.37 In short, brains and religions do not only filter the real; they also protect us from it. The sacred as a kind of dangerous energy again.

Obviously, in a figure like John Hick, the filter thesis is not just a method for integrating mystical states and modern brain science. It has become the privileged model for balancing sameness and difference and for doing comparative theology across the entire history of religions.

neuroscientists at the Cusp

But all of this, to put it mildly, is a hard sell. It is pure heresy within contemporary neuroscience, which con- tinues to insist that mind is a purely local, material process that blips out when the brain blips out. Oddly, scholars of religion, who one would think might have some serious questions here, have largely followed suit, insisting that all human experiences are products of local historical, social, and biological events. Any true transcendence of spatial or temporal boundaries (that is, of history) has become, in principle, impossible. We are back to a form of the traumatic secret, which really boils down to honest

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intellectual differences between those who have been “split into two” and those who have not.

But what happens when a previously doubting neuroscientist or medical professional is split into two? What then? It is a most striking fact that the filter thesis has recently returned in a number of practicing brain scientists and medical professionals, who often come to a very similar conclusion through their own extraordinary experiences. Moreover, very much unlike the humanists and the forgotten philosophers, these scientists are given immense authority in our present culture. Hence their voices can be heard in a different way.

What do they say? Pretty much exactly what the humanists and the forgotten philosophers have said: that there are other ways of knowing; that the forms of knowledge that these others ways generate do not need to be pitted against science; and that the brain may well be a wondrously evolved piece of biological electronics for picking up something not really “in” the brain.

Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight

Consider first the Harvard-trained brain anatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. On the morning of December 10, 1996 Taylor experienced a massive stroke that shut down the left hemisphere of her brain. As a neuro- anatomist, she knew exactly what was happening as it happened. She watched her linguistic, memory, and identity processing disappear like cotton candy on a tongue. Deprived of its neurological base, it just all melted away. But, as these cognitive and ego-related capacities in the left hemisphere blipped out, something else, shining through the right hemi- sphere, blipped in. The sun of the rational mind was temporarily blocked out by a total neurological eclipse of sorts—the stroke. Night fell, and the vast- ness, peace, and infinity of an inner outer space could suddenly be “seen.”

Those are my words. In her own neuroanatomical (and Buddhist) language, as her left side gradually came back online over the next eight months, Taylor found herself alternating “between two distinct and

opposite realities: the euphoric nirvana of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace, and the logical, sequential left brain.”38 Consciousness and culture were gradually coming back together, and with them her sense of social reality and personal identity.

This still sounds more than a bit like the reduction of mind to brain, even if it is to two brains now. But there was more, and Taylor seems to find religious language the only really adequate means to express it. “By the end of that morning, my consciousness shifted into a perception that I was at one with the universe. Since that time, I have come to understand how it is that we are capable of having a ‘mystical’ or ‘metaphysical’ experience—relative to our brain anatomy.”39 Obviously, her language is very care- ful here: “a perception,” “relative to our brain anatomy.” Those scare-quotes around “mystical” and “ metaphysical” are guarded and ambiguous. But then there is that italicized word: “I was at one with the universe.” Like her double-sided brain, Jill Bolte Taylor is alternating between two different worlds of meaning, two different possibilities: a rational one and a reflexive one.

Like a good brain scientist she was “reducing” it all to the brain, but this brain was looking more and more like a, well, like a door. The human being now appeared to her as “an electrical being; an apparition of energy smoldering around an organic lump.”40 She now knew the brain-body much as Ioan Couliano imagined it, that is, as a “a portal through which the energy of who I am can be beamed into a three- dimensional external space.” The body, she could see now, is “a marvelous temporary home.” She marveled at how she could have spent so many years unaware of this, never really understanding “that I was just visiting there.”41

She turns to one of the traditional symbolisms of the soul: as a living force or cosmic energy. Like Myers and James before her, she concludes that we are not who we think we are:

I shuddered at the awareness that I was no longer a normal human being. How on earth would I exist as a

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member of the human race with this heightened perception that we are each a part of it all, and that the life force energy within each of us contains the power of the universe? How could I fit in with our society when I walk the earth with no fear?42

An eccentric comparative side note. As Taylor’s left brain shut down during the stroke, she reports perceiving her body as if it were a strange creature; she now perceived her hands, for example, to be long and claw-like. Although she does not put it this way (this is my sin, not hers), we might go so far as to suggest that Taylor was “splitting” into two and perceiving herself as an alien or “other.” Or is it just an accident that long, claw-like hands are commonly reported in the alien encounter literature?

Being in one’s “right mind” certainly took on new meaning. To our right mind, Taylor explains, “the moment of now is timeless and abundant.” Time, history, and the clock are no more. It is this same “right mind” that is the source of some of our deepest ethical sensibilities and political dreams: “The pre- sent moment is a time when everything and everyone are connected together as one. As a result, our right mind perceives each of us as equal members of the human family.”43

Sameness. Not so the left mind. It is analytic and thinks in

units of linear time. It divides, dissects, analyzes, and insists on “details, details, and more details about those details.”44 It also goes on and on (and on) about “the insignificant affairs of society.”45 It chatters to us constantly in order to shore up the social ego with all its ethnic, racial, national, cultural, and religious convictions.

Difference. But it is the sameness that is finally deeper than

the differences within the human as two. Thus Taylor marvels at how she finally realized that “I really had been a figment of my own imagination!” In short, the ego was revealed for what it is—a social construction, a relative, temporary point of view on the space–time grid. And consciousness was revealed for what it is—a presence of mythological proportions,

beyond space and time, which is filtered through the brain and body but is in fact neither. In Taylor’s own words: “I was simply a being of light radiating life into the world.”46

Sameness and difference.

eben alexander’s Cosmic Coma

Consider a second example: the neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, III and his Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife.47 Alexander completed his MD at Duke Medical School and spent fifteen years on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. He shared the usual medical reductive con- victions about the material nature of mind: mind is brain and nothing more. That was before November 10, 2008, when, at the age of 54, Alexander began experiencing intense pain in his back and head and collapsed for seven days into a deep coma, brought on by an extremely rare case of e-coli meningitis.

Within the coma, Alexander encountered, in his own emphasis, “a world of consciousness that existed completely free of the limitations of my physical brain.” This world may or may not have been independent of the brain, but it was certainly formed around some classical religious themes—particularly flight, energy, light, music, unity, and love. This was also a world organized around some vivid visionary stages, to which he gives capitalized names: the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View, the Spinning Melody, the Gateway, the Girl on the Butterfly Wing (who is also encountered as an Orb of Light), and, finally, the Core.

As we have seen throughout these pages, modern mystical experiences often take place within an evolutionary framework. Alexander’s fits into this pattern. While in the Realm of the Earthworm-Eye’s View, he describes how he was in a “primordial” state. It was “as if I had regressed back to some state of being from the very beginnings of life.” He felt like a mole or a worm. “I wasn’t human while I was in this place. I wasn’t even animal. I was something before, and below, all that.”48

It was the Spinning Melody that rescued him from this muddy, earthy world—a beautiful white musical

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light that spun slowly, casting out golden filaments, as it called to him. It is not clear how, but the Spinning Melody acted as the means through which he entered what he calls the Gateway (the theme of the door or portal again), a paradisiac natural landscape that he experienced as “completely real” or “hyper-real.” This world featured millions of butterflies, gorgeous valleys, streams, waterfalls, people, dogs, and, high above the clouds, “flocks of transparent orbs” or “shimmering beings” that resembled birds or angels but that were “more advanced. Higher.”49 He was riding one such butterfly, accompanied by a girl in a powder blue and indigo dress. Alexander communi- cated with the beings there directly, without language. He understood instantly things that, here, would have taken him years to process and understand.

He then entered “an immense void, completely dark, infinitive in size, yet also infinitely comforting.” This was the Core. The Core was God as “mother” or “giant cosmic womb.” Alexander remembers one particular sound associated with the Core: “Om” (which the student of religion recognizes immedi- ately as the most famous of all Hindu mantras and the modern icon for Hinduism as a world religion). Om taught him that there are “countless higher dimensions” from which one can enter our world at any place or time.50 Most of all, he learned that love is “the basis of everything.”51

Alexander invokes the now familiar filter thesis and the bilateral brain to explain why we normally cannot access such truths. Indeed he explicitly cites the most extensive contemporary work on the filter thesis, Irreducible Mind (2007), edited by neuroscien- tist Edward Kelly and his colleagues.52 In his own words, our “brain blocks out, or veils, that larger cosmic background.”53 In an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) host Steve Paulson, he expands on this idea. There he explains how we are being “dumbed down” by our bodies. He speaks of the “shackles” of our brain and body and of how “we are conscious in spite of our brain,” not because of it. All of this is necessary, he speculates, since, if we were in constant touch with what he was in touch with in that world, we would not be able to survive as mammals

in this one. He even refers to our individual forms of mind as a “divine spark” and the brain as a kind “reducing valve” actively reducing our access to and awareness of this spark of divinity.

Alexander believes that he was given a “foretaste” of our evolutionary future. He has little practical hope of explaining all of this to us here and now, though. His experience, after all, was

rather like being a chimpanzee, becoming human for a single day to experience all of the wonders of human knowledge, and then returning to one’s chimp friends and trying to tell them what it was like knowing several different Romance languages, the calculus, and the immense scale of the universe.54

This, of course, is an evolutionary updating of Plato’s Cave.

His takeaway? That “conscious awareness can exist entirely independent of the brain,” and that only a fraction of what consciousness is can be captured in language and communicated to those who have not “been there.” Alexander now knows many things that his peers and medical colleagues, who have not “been there,” do not. Foremost among these things is that the materialist model upon which conventional science is based is “fundamentally flawed.” “At its core,” the neurosurgeon writes, this materialism “intentionally ignores what I believe is the fundament of all existence — the nature of consciousness.”55 Accordingly, we will never make sense of conscious- ness working from below up. It makes infinite more sense to come down “from the other side.”56

There has been much debate about Dr. Alexander’s book. Whenever an elite cultural figure (like a neuro- surgeon) stands up against the reigning materialist paradigm, he or she is likely to get some serious push back. As we noted in Chapter 8, the social system cannot tolerate such open challenges to its (always false) claims to represent all of reality. What is there to say, then? A reflexive re-reader of religion (this one, anyway) would be deeply sympathetic to Alexander’s most basic takeaways: that mind is not brain, and that trauma is necessary to break open the

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healthy brain filter. Such a reader, however, would also note that the neurosurgeon lacks an adequate theory of the image and the imagination. Hence he appears to interpret his visions in a very literal manner, that is, as a light not filtered and shaped by the stained glass windows of the religious imagination.

Moreover, both Dr. Alexander and his critics seem unable to think in both–and terms, that is, in ways that can appreciate both the constructed, imagined nature of the visionary event (the stained glass window) and the potential cosmic truths that appear to be “coming through” that glass (the light). To stick to our analogy, Alexander himself appears to identify the stories told in the stained glass window with the light itself, while his critics cannot seem to recognize that there may be real light com- ing through the window of his brain. In both cases, the both–and has collapsed into a simple either–or.

sam Harris on Telepathy and panpsychism

Along with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and the late journalist Christopher Hitchens, neuro- scientist Sam Harris is one of a handful of intellec- tuals who have carved out a public voice sometimes called the New Atheism. New Atheism is a movement concerned to establish Enlightenment reason, particularly as it is enshrined in modern science, as the only legitimate mode of knowing the world and ourselves. These authors have taken an extreme polemical stance toward religion, more or less equating it with its most literalist, fundamentalist, and exclusivist forms. Harris’s The End of Faith (2004) is a good example of this polemical writing.

There is much that could be said about the New Atheists, from the obvious post-9/11 moral concerns around religious intolerance, which animate their project, through their general lack of training in the humanities, to the simplistic and frankly naïve pictures that they paint of religious people. They appear to share the assumption that being a scientist somehow makes one an authority on everything, even on things that one quite obviously knows very

little about. A single feature of the New Atheism will concern us here, namely that which sets apart Harris from the other voices: his transparent open- ness to psychical phenomena and his willingness to entertain panpsychism as a plausible option for modeling the relationship between mind and matter.

In his books, blog, and interviews, Harris has made it clear that he considers the data on psychical phenomena, including telepathy and the CORT literature, to be worthy of consideration.57 In an interview with NPR host Steve Paulson, he spoke casually of experiencing minor instances of telepathy (for example, knowing that someone was going to call on the phone before the phone rang). Very much unlike his atheist colleagues, Harris is willing both to admit that such things are quite common and then to observe that such phenomena may well have something profound to teach us about the world and the mind’s relationship to it.

Harris is deeply skeptical that egos survive death, so he is hardly arguing for something like “the immortality of the soul.” But he is open to the possibility that some other, impersonal form of consciousness is fundamental to the nature of the cosmos. He said this to Paulson:

So the idea that a brain can die and a soul that still speaks English and recognizes Granny is going to float away into the afterlife, that seems to be profoundly implausible. And yet we do not know what the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity ultimately is. For instance, we could be living in a universe where consciousness goes all the way down to the bedrock so that there is some interior subjective dimension to an electron.58

Recall that we have seen this possible solution already in a figure like William James, who imagined “subtler forms of matter” and a sea of cosmic consciousness out of which all subjects and objects arise.

For his own part, Harris explains that he is “quite skeptical” of science ever being able to solve this. I can only add: and well he should be. The scientific method, at least as it is presently conceived, only works once one has separated the subject from the

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object being studied, indeed removed subjectivity altogether. It seems extremely doubtful that one could ever establish the subjective nature of a minded cosmos by removing subjectivity from one’s mode of knowing and then insisting that this purely objectivist form of knowledge is the only way to know the universe.

David eagleman, the Broken Watch, and the parable of the radio

Finally, consider again the neuroscientist David Eagleman. Eagleman intentionally wears a broken Russian watch to his lab, as a sign that “we’re all wear- ing broken watches.” What he means by this is that linear history or clock time is “at best a convenient fiction.” Watches (and historians, I would add) assume that “time ticks steadily, predictably forward, when our experience shows that it often does the opposite: it stretches and compresses, skips a beat and doubles back.”59 It also sometimes stops, or just ceases to be, as we have seen numerous times in our journey together, from Meister Eckhart and Anita Moorjani to Jill Bolte Taylor.

As one would expect by now, Eagleman’s radical thinking about time possesses its own anomalous origins. Indeed he credits his eventual turn to neuroscience to a most unusual event of his boy- hood: yet another secret revealed in the midst of a trauma. Eagleman was eight when he stepped out onto a roof on a construction site that turned out to be no roof at all but a sheet of tar paper. Here is how The New Yorker columnist Burkhard Bilger describes what happened next:

His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach. The brick floor floats upward—some shiny nails are scattered across it—as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remem- bers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.60

Eagleman has been venturing down that rabbit hole ever since. He calls himself a “possibilian,” by which he means that he is open to considering things that are now considered to be impossible by our best science.

Including, it turns out, the filter thesis. At the very end of his book, Incognito (2011), he turns to the question of the soul. Here he advances a critique of reductionism, that is, of the idea that we can under- stand something like mind by reducing it to its constituent parts, like neurons and chemicals. Probably not, Eagleman concludes. He also expresses some serious reservations around promissory materialism—the commonly heard claim that, although we do not yet know how to explain mind through material processes, we eventually will. Indeed everything will eventually be explained in a materialist framework because everything is finally only matter.

Maybe, Eagleman concludes; maybe not. It is extremely unlikely that we just happen to be living at the moment when all things will soon be explained, he points out. Previous generations claimed the same, and they were all very wrong. The much more likely scenario, Eagleman observes, is that the more we learn about the brain and con- sciousness, the more strange, not simple, things will get. Here is where his final thought experiment comes in. A parable:

Imagine that you are a Kalahari Bushman and that you stumble upon a transistor radio in the sand. You might pick it up, twiddle the knobs, and suddenly, to your surprise, hear voices streaming out of this strange little box … Now let’s say you begin a careful, scientific study of what causes the voices. You notice that each time you pull out the green wire, the voices stop. When you put the wire back on its contact, the voices begin again … you come to a clear conclusion: the voices depend entirely on the integrity of the circuitry. At some point, a young person asks you how some simple loops of electrical signals can engender music and con- versations, and you admit that you don’t know—but you insist that your science is about to crack that problem at any moment.

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Assuming that you are truly isolated, what you do not know is pretty much everything that you need to know: radio waves, electromagnetism, distant cities, radio stations, and modern civilization. You would not even have the capacity to imagine such things. And, even if you could, “you have no technology to demonstrate the existence of the waves, and everyone justifiably points out that the onus is on you to convince them.” You could convince almost no one, and you yourself would probably reject the existence of such mysterious, spirit-like waves. You would become a “radio materialist.”

“I’m not asserting that the brain is like a radio,” Eagleman points out at the end of his book, “but I am pointing out that it could be true. There is nothing in our current science that rules this out.”61 This is where the historian of religions steps in. There are, after all, numerous clues in the general history of religions that rule the radio theory in, and that suggest—though hardly prove—that the human brain may well be a kind of transmitter or receiver of consciousness. The historian of religions, this one anyway, says to the open-minded neuroscientist: “Looker, look here.”

Concluding Thoughts: Culture, Cognition, and Consciousness

I am often asked by my students what I think about all of this. I just tell them. Why not? I ask them to tell me what they think. Why should I not answer their questions about what I think? As you have probably guessed by now (I have hardly hidden the fact), my answers stumble through and around these last reflexive re-readings.

Much of this goes back to my dad’s advice about mechanical systems: you can best understand a system by taking it apart and by noticing, very care- fully, when it misfires or does not work the way you expected. We saw this truth, of course, in the myth- ical figure of the trickster very early on in our journey together, in Chapter 4. We encountered it again, in Chapter 6, with the subject of purity systems and

sexual–spiritual transgression, and once again in Chapter 8, with the anomalous nature of robust paranormal events. Here we are again, addressing completely outrageous things, like a precog mother, clairvoyant death dreams, a modern resurrection apparition, the fourth dimension, poltergeist physics, and neuroscience mystics.

And why not? Are not these exactly the kinds of things that my dad told me to look for? They certainly look like “glitches” in the consensual fabric of our social reality. Remember Neo in The Matrix seeing what he thinks is the same black cat walk by twice? The character named Trinity explains that such déjà vu moments “happen when they change something,” that is, when the illusion of social reality is being tinkered with or recalibrated. That is very close to how I understand extreme religious experiences. These are moments when the social, psychological, and spiritual fabric of reality can be changed, rewritten, coded anew. Whether this fabric is changed or not depends upon a community’s response to them. It is by no means automatic.

Not that I “believe” such things. Actually I do not believe in beliefs at all (although I do believe in belief ). But I am most intrigued by the “written” or “authored” qualities of these moments in our lives. Hence two of the most common modern descriptors: “It was as if I were caught in a novel,” or “It was as if I were a character in a movie.” I think such phrases are more or less accurate descriptions of what is actually happening, not just in a robust paranormal event (when this is made patently obvious), but in every moment of our normal day-to-day lives (when it is not obvious at all). We are caught in a type of novel or movie (called a culture or religion), which we our- selves have written and performed in all the ways we have explored together.

But here is the “flip.” Here is why we opened with Rob Beschizza’s wonderful image of The Reader. If our cultural and religious worlds are authored by us (and they are), and if we are caught in them as if in a novel or a movie (and we are), it naturally and inev- itably follows that we can re-read ourselves and so author new novels and movies in which to live. The

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process can be reversed. The very fabric of our lives can be re-read, and hence, eventually, re-written. You (both of you) have this extraordinary power to help re-read the human past and hence re-write the human future.

Granted, we do not really understand our individual roles in these reading and writing processes. It is diffi- cult to detect the glow of our own eyes (a Hindu or Buddhist adept might say, “to know when the ‘divine eye’ or third eye opens”), that is, to know when we are re-reading and hence also re-writing our cultural script, and when we are just being read by it. Maybe both processes (the psychological and the social) are always in play. Maybe we always possess three eyes, even if the third visionary eye is usually closed. Obviously, then, I do not offer anything here as the last word on religion. I too am written, am read, am a character in someone else’s novel. I have not stepped off the page or out of the movie screen.

But others have. This is why I think we have so much to learn from the spectacles of Taylor’s stroke of insight, Alexander’s cosmic coma, and Eagleman’s fall off the roof into the rabbit hole. To be perfectly frank, I think that the future of “comparing religions” lies precisely in these sorts of extreme events and what they can teach us about the human brain and the deeper nature of consciousness—which we might think of here as the ultimate C behind, below, and above all the other Cs of our previous comparative practices.

Consciousness is not only the ground of all com- parative grounds, of all our previous Cs. It is also the ground of all science, all rationalism, all reduc- tionism, all religious experience, indeed all human knowledge and experience. Moreover, as far as we can tell at the moment, this final C is entirely sui generis. It is its own thing. We know of nothing else like it in the universe, and anything we would know later we would only know in, through, and because of this same consciousness. Many today, of course, want to claim the exact opposite, namely that con- sciousness is not its own thing, is reducible to warm wet tissue and brainhood. But to this day no one has come even close to showing how this might work.

Probably because it doesn’t.

Let me frame the situation in neuroanatomical terms. An author like Jill Bolte Taylor shows us that the human as two is not just an ancient mystical doctrine, as we saw in Chapter 9. The human as two is a universal neuroanatomical fact. This is not a truth that you are free to accept or deny, as if denying it would suddenly turn your two brain hemispheres into one hemisphere. You cannot deny what you secretly are behind that thick skull of yours. In essence, we all have two brains. We are different from ourselves. There is an alien or Other inside us.

No one has shown us this more clearly and ele- gantly than the British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. His massive work on the bilateral brain, The Master and His Emissary (2009), demonstrates that, although imagination and reason are “global” functions of both brains, each hemisphere does indeed specialize in different functions, as we saw already above with Jill Bolte Taylor. But here is the twist. For McGilchrist, it is the right brain, with its focus on broad patterns, interconnectedness, implicit meaning, and wholeness, that is the “Master,” that is more fundamental to our being in the world, whereas the left brain, with its focus on detail, abstraction, and precision, is the “emissary” of this Master. In the language of Albert Einstein, the intuitive mind is “a sacred gift,” and reason is “a faithful servant.”62

McGilchrist has summed up his ideas in a brief animated lecture.63 There, as in the book, he points out that western culture has seen an increasing “take over” by the left brain. The servant now claims to be the Master. It is all about the left brain’s way of seeing the world. It is all about more and more “information” and less and less “understanding.” It is all about the “closed system” of reason, science, abstraction, and a mechanical perfection in which everything can be explained. But this closed system is perfect and complete only because it has expelled everything that does not fit into it.

Sound familiar? It is probably no accident that McGilchrist, as an

advocate of balance and wisdom, tends toward the filter thesis. He writes: “I believe it may be that consciousness does not depend on a brain for its

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existence: just, in the absence of a brain, it is deprived of its expression as that particular mind.” To illustrate what he means, the psychiatrist invokes an analogy that is common among filter theorists. He compares the brain to a television set. He observes: “the TV set is only mediative. It does not give rise to the programme you watch. And you couldn’t tell which it does—originate the programme or transmit it—by inspecting the workings: the TV set would look much the same whichever.”64 This, of course, is exactly what Eagleman suggested with his parable of the radio. It would look like the voices are coming from the box. But they are not.

We can go further. The fact that a particular TV is unplugged, malfunctioning, or completely destroyed does not mean that the little people who once appeared in it are no more. It simply means that the signals that are beaming them into this three-dimensional box cannot be received, translated, and projected any longer. This would also explain all those reports that compare soul-states to energy-states, to “light,” “ radiance,” “power,” “magnetism,” “electricity,” or now “plasma.” Maybe they are. Maybe that is what is running the human television set.

We can also note that the analogy, like all analogies, is flawed, since it is extremely doubtful that what we call a “person” is independent of the body brain, as an actor or actress is independent of your TV set. It seems more likely that the human personality is created from the interaction of the energy of consciousness and the biological TV that is a human being. It is as if the cosmos evolved a biological organism to broadcast and watch itself.

Such a thought experiment, of course, does not prove anything. But at least it gives us an idea of how something like a soul that is “in” but not entirely “of ” the body could be the case. Such a thought experiment enables us to imagine the impossible as possible.

What does all of this bilateral brain talk have to do with the study of religion? Pretty much everything. Are not all the rational re-readings that we have examined and performed here—all those historical, contextual, psychological, sociological, postcolonial, and cognitive

methods—left brain methods? They emphasize difference and division, not sameness and equality. They only recognize the clock time of the calendar or the cognitive computer-like processing of the brain. They know nothing of what Eckhart, Moorjani, Huxley, and Taylor call the now of consciousness. Similarly, they are all comfortable enough with talk of mechanical or machine-like “metaphors,” but they reject, in principle, the possibility of any living “symbol” manifesting something outside the brain-box.

This is hardly a new story. Once we understand the bilateral brain, we can easily see that the left brain (which controls the right side of the body) has long demeaned and even demonized the right brain (which controls the left side of the body). Hence all those cultural examples of the “left” side being asso- ciated with impurity, negative moral judgments, indeed evil itself (the Latin word for “left” is sinister). Jesus, after all, does not sit at the left hand of God, and when Er saw souls judged negatively, he saw them going to the left and down. Closer to home, when my father was in Catholic grade school in the 1940s, the nuns literally hit his “bad” left hand with a ruler whenever he tried to write with it. The result: he learned to write with his “right” hand.

Alas, much too often, rational re-readers behave more or less like those misguided nuns. They whack the left hand and so scold the right brain as bad. They focus—admittedly, exquisitely—on culture and cognition, that is, on all those cultural grids, mental modules, metaphors, and processes of the computer- brain that so effectively delimit, particularize, and personalize consciousness. But they make fun of any intuited whole, any grand comparison. And they adamantly deny consciousness as consciousness, that is, the Sun outside Plato’s Cave. Although they should be celebrated as major intellectual accomplishments, we can now see that the left brain rational re-readings represent only half of the picture.

I am not, of course, proposing that we simply move now from the methods of the left to those of the right. That would be disastrous, and dangerous. I am proposing rather that we learn to move back and forth, that we acknowledge both the colorful stain

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of the man-made windows and the light streaming through. Such a reflexive model, I hasten to add, need not imply that mind is often, or even ever, experienced in a completely unmediated form, or that it is distinct from the material cosmos. Hence my “interaction” comments on the flawed TV analogy. As the scholar- ship has long argued, it appears that mind as we know it is always mediated, filtered, reduced, embodied. As egos, we are those socialized fleshy filters, and if we know anything as egos, it must, by definition, be medi- ated.65 Hence that lovely line that Philip K. Dick heard in a dream after he was radiated by Valis and came to understand the human as two: “‘One day the masks will come off, and you will understand all.’ It came to pass—and I was one of the masks …”66

Do we really think that we can explain what Jill Bolte Taylor refers to as a species-wide, mutating life force beaming through the portal of the right brain with the local cultural, ego-related, and linguistic equipment of the left brain? Can more and more reason and computer metaphors really get us there? Can the mask explain the masked?

Probably not. We might finally observe that the reflexive re-

reader, the student in the school of the more, “wants it both ways” not because he or she is confused or is trying to be diplomatic, but because the human being really is both ways. If one were to take this doubleness to its end, one might find that reflexivity—the key skill that we have practiced throughout this book— eventually leads to a most profound comparative practice. We might imagine this double vision as a yet more acute awareness of our biological, historical, social, and economic conditionings, but also as a future mind space that has yet to take any stable institutional form. In terms of the latter, we might imagine a future form of consciousness becoming aware not of just more and more culture and more and more cognition, but of consciousness itself. That is, we might imagine “turning around” from all those entrancing movies on the screen to the projector behind us doing all that projecting. We might gaze at the light coming through the hole in the wall and look at the looker looking back at us.

The Tough Questions

1 Watch Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk at http:// www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_pow- erful_stroke_of_insight.html and comment on her use of Buddhist language to describe the felt experience of what she knew. Do you think this would have worked with theistic language about “God”?

2 What do you think this sentence means? “I don’t believe in beliefs (although I do believe

in belief ).” How is this an example of a reflexive re-reading of religion?

3 As we have seen in this last chapter, scientists, like everyone else, often have profound religious experiences that shatter their worldviews and remake them. Why do you think that these reports carry so much authority in our present culture, when they are saying much the same things that other writers have said for millennia?

notes

1 Robert A. Orsi, “The Problem of the Holy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, edited by Robert A. Orsi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 99.

2 Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man (London: Unwin Books, 1970), 76.

3 Tagore, The Religion of Man, 101. 4 Tagore, The Religion of Man, 58–59.

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